When will we really be able to talk to our PCs?

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When will we really be able to talk to our PCs?

David NahamooManager of human language technologies, IBM ResearchOur goal for the end of the decade is machines with fewer errors of transcription than a human. Right now, it's about 10 times worse than humans. The big stumbling blocks are background noise, accents, overlapping dialog, emotional speech. One promising aspect we're developing is audiovisual speech recognition - supplementing a microphone with a camera to catch lip movements and visual cues.

Michael PhillipsCTO, ScanSoftAt this point, it's less of a technology issue and more of an adoption issue. The keyboard and mouse are pretty well entrenched. You could use dictation software and be as fast or faster, but spoken input requires a new style of working: You have to cut down on the uhs and ahs and speak more fully formed thoughts.

Richard SternComputer science professor and speech systems expert, Carnegie MellonWe're still not even close to having a voice interface that will let you throw away your keyboard and mouse. Voice input is not an end in itself - it's one more piece of an infrastructure of headphones, speaker, mouse, keyboard, and screen working in tandem. In five years or less, we should expect every regular OS to include speech and also start seeing it as the primary modality on cell phones and PDAs.